The Uncanny Valley

-By Greg Ruth

Well, here we are at the intersection of weird and magical.For those of you who weren't already haunted by my use, or even dare I say, overuse of the new Photospeak app for my portraits... well you're in for a treat. A creepy, mildly terrifying but still kind of cool treat. I used my ipad to set these up, edit and format them. It;s a fairly simple app to use, though there are important steps to exploit its functions best. Seeing my drawings start to move in subtle ways like this, blink, even smirk delights me in ways I can't really describe. Some worked better than others and some worked perfectly as if born to it. Some that worked best seemed to do so because of the fuzzy edges the pictures had within them. I found only one sumi ink piece really functioned with this app... the others seemed only to showcase the edges of the effect. Many that I thought would be so great for this simply crashed or did terribly creepy glitches. Here's a few of the my favorite below:

NUX and FURIOSA from MAD MAX: FURY ROAD drawn with graphite on paper, 13" x 19". Nux was one of the first pieces I tried this out on and I think remains the most successful piece overall.

Buster Keaton gets animated in this image that was made for a private commission using sumi ink and graphite.

These below were derived from the 52 Weeks Project portrait series inspired by Twin Peaks, THE WHITE LODGE. You can see the series in full, HERE David Lynch (as Gordon Cole) came out so well I think it may rival Nux for the top seat in this little experiment.

This one below came from art generated for my forthcoming graphic novel with Ethan Hawke, INDEH from Hachette/Grand Central Books due on shelves June 2016. Something about the frame in a room made this one of my very favorites.

This fella a.k.a., Peter Capaldi, was derived from drawings executed for my 52 Weeks Project series, THIRTEEN DOCTORS. You can see the series as a whole HERE.

This below was created using the original graphite drawing for David Nickle's Tor.com short story, THE CARETAKERS due in early 2016. A terror made so much more terrible....